On March 1, the thought of the Houston Rockets challenging the Golden State Warriors for the Western Conference's final play-in tournament spot seemed laughable. The Warriors were seven games ahead of the Rockets, who then sat 12th in the standings.
Few could have predicted the Rockets, who went an NBA-best 13-2 last month, would become one the league's hottest teams.
The Rockets' deficit remains three games heading into Thursday's virtual must-win home showdown against the Warriors. But while Houston's playoff hopes are slim -- simulations based on ESPN's Basketball Power Index (BPI) show the Rockets reaching 10th just 1.5% of the time -- we could be watching the origin story of the NBA's next young contender.
Whether or not it translates into postseason play this season, Houston's late-season surge looks like a preview of what's to come in the West, where the conference's aging powers are only narrowly holding off the rising teams below them in the standings.
What can we take from the Rockets' strong finish? How crowded might the West postseason race be a year from now? Let's take a look.
Meaning of March magic
There's a well-earned skepticism in NBA circles about teams getting hot in March, when the league's title contenders are often just biding time before the playoffs and lottery-bound teams are going deep into their benches.
Consider the 2021-22 Detroit Pistons, who went 6-10 (.375) in March while outscoring opponents with rookie Cade Cunningham leading the way. That performance helped convince the Pistons -- who added veteran forward Bojan Bogdanovic the following offseason -- they were near contention for a postseason spot. Instead, Detroit has yet to win six games in any month since.
More generally, however, this conventional wisdom doesn't bear out. When it comes to predicting a team's record the next season, winning percentage in March actually has the strongest relationship of any month in 82-game seasons since 2017-18. Correlation is similarly high in November, when teams are typically healthy, but it drops dramatically in December before rising as teams make in-season trades that will affect their roster in future seasons.
There are other cautionary tales, such as the 2013-14 New York Knicks, who went 11-4 in March with an eight-game win streak after carrying a 21-38 record into the month -- seemingly getting back to their 54-win form of the previous season. Instead, the Knicks crashed to 17-65 the following year under new coach Derek Fisher.
Still, March success has largely carried over to the next season. Of the other eight teams since the lockout season who have improved their winning percentage at least 28 percentage points from the start of the month, four jumped to 49 wins or better the following season -- although the 2018-19 LA Clippers come with an asterisk because they turned over their roster to add Paul George and Kawhi Leonard that offseason.
It's also worth noting the magnitude of the Rockets' March improvement is unparalleled in NBA history. Among teams that played at least 10 games in the month, only one team has upped its winning percentage more over the duration of the month: the 1998-99 champion San Antonio Spurs. Due to the NBA lockout, the Spurs had played just 14 games through the end of February that season.
Next season's West looks even deeper
With Houston climbing to 38-37, the West currently has 11 teams above .500 going into Thursday's games, which would be the most for a conference in NBA history if the season ended today. The West had 10 teams finish better than .500 in 2000-01 and 2017-18, while the East pulled it off in 2021-22. Even if the Rockets finish at .500, they'd surpass the 2000-01 Denver Nuggets (40-42) for the best record ever by an 11th-place team.
Ahead of the offseason, next season's West looks even deeper. Remember, one of those four below-.500 teams in the conference is the Memphis Grizzlies, who won 50-plus games each of the previous two seasons before a combination of Ja Morant's league suspension and an unprecedented number of injuries doomed them to the lottery this season.
None of Memphis' injuries should linger beyond this season, and a healthy Grizzlies team could be right back in contention for a top-six spot in the West. The San Antonio Spurs figure to improve with No. 1 overall pick and presumptive Rookie of the Year Victor Wembanyama heading into his second season, while the Utah Jazz were in the mix for a play-in spot before trading away three of their top nine players in minutes per game at the deadline.
That improvement at the bottom of the conference should worry the three veteran teams currently in the play-in. With an average team age weighted by minutes played of 29.8 at season's end, the Phoenix Suns have the NBA's third-oldest rotation. The Warriors are fourth at 29.4, while the Los Angeles Lakers (28.9) aren't far behind in seventh.
Though the Rockets are no longer as young as they were last season -- when they had the youngest average team age in NBA history -- after adding veterans in free agency, highlighted by starters Dillon Brooks and Fred VanVleet, they've still started three players 22 years old or younger much of the year. With 21-year-old Alperen Sengun sidelined much of March, 21-year-old rookie Amen Thompson has stepped into the lineup and Houston remains one of the league's 10 youngest teams overall.
Younger teams unsurprisingly tend to get better as well. On average over the past decade, teams with a weighted age around 26 like the Rockets have improved almost three wins the following season. Meanwhile, teams as old as Golden State have declined nearly six wins on average. (For Phoenix, it's almost seven.)
To some degree, those dramatic drop-offs are probably in part because the league's oldest teams also tend to be some of the best, meaning more room to fall off with possibly less interest in accumulating regular-season wins in favor of peaking during the playoffs. The pressure put on the West's aging play-in teams won't allow that kind of relaxation.
The data is clear, though: Houston, Memphis and the West's other young teams are coming for the rest of the conference. And that might mean next spring it's the Warriors or another aging, superstar-driven team that is battling just to make the play-in.